Ferrari 575M Maranello F1

The muscle car of Ferraris is now available with a paddle shifter, making it easier than ever for people with $247,607 to drive it.

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Enzo Ferrari - the man, not the sheep-head-ugly supercar - once said, "A Ferrari owner is not necessarily a Ferrari driver."

Now the company that bears his name has made a liar of him. Well, it began making a liar of him in 1996 with the introduction of the 550 Maranello. The 550 was so easy and comfortable to drive that even the director of engineering on the car, Amedeo Felisa, said, "We wanted a car that is easier to drive [than previous 12-cylinder, mid-engine, two-seat Ferraris] and requires no special driving skills." The 575M Maranello F1, the evolution of the 550, requires even less skill of its driver.

No special driving skills, huh? Well, then we found the perfect venue for a test: the loudest and longest traffic jam known to man, the Detroit area's annual Woodward Dream Cruise nostalgia-fest. The Ferrari that anyone could drive would meet the event that anybody can participate in. And there we were, fighting upstream among Mustang GTs, primer-gray '70s Chevy Novas, and fiberglass-bodied highboys. We expected to be dismissed as slumming interlopers. But people loved the car. It gained us admittance to places and parties for which we had no reservation. A bicyclist hit a guy standing on the sidewalk as they were both transfixed by the passing Ferrari. And we lost track of how many times we watched bystanders mouth the words, "Oh, my gawdddd? A Fur-raw-ree!"

The 550 was created from the platform of Ferrari's four-place, front-engine grand tourer, the 456 - making it into a two-place, front-engine grand tourer. Gone is the flashy, flat, and straked styling of mid-engine Italian exotics of the '70s and '80s. This is a classic GT: a long, pointed shark's nose, a short rear deck, and relatively upright glass. The folks on Woodward Avenue might never have seen a Maranello before, but they sure as hell recognized its type.

Gone too from the Ferrari 12-cylinder model are a steering wheel canted at an angle appropriate only for a UPS truck and the previous inability to carry on a conversation with your co-pilot due to all the racket. This deeply disappoints people of simian proportion who are also mute. But we liked it. Getting into a 575 is no more difficult than plopping yourself into an Accord. Tall guys have plenty of headroom, and folks of any size can find a comfortable driving position. Every surface higher than your hip point is covered in leather. The change receptacle on the console? It's tailored in no fewer than three pieces of cowhide. Oh, and the air conditioning works brilliantly. The only problem with the interior is that the small T-bar shifter on the console used to engage reverse in this paddle-shifter car was considered unnaturally small by passersby for such a manly ride.

If you want a hyper-agile sports car with a rearing horse in the grille, get a 360 Modena. The 575M Maranello is Ferrari's muscle car - its big iron. Despite extensive use of aluminum, it weighs a portly 4085 pounds (173 more than a 1997 Maranello we tested). We'd like to blame the weight on the fact that the 575M, with 29 more horsepower (up to 508) than the 550, was no faster to 60 mph than the old car, at 4.2 seconds. But the 575M has a better power-to-weight ratio. It's the transmission's fault.

The big news here is the first application of the F1-paddle-shifting transmission with a V-12 Ferrari. Because the clutch is automatically engaged, we couldn't do our normal wheel-spinning launch. For drag racing, Ferrari provides a launch-control system built into the transmission's computer. Well, it does in markets outside the U.S. at least, where the company has fewer concerns about liability. This system is disabled in U.S. cars, as we found by trying it and succeeding only in filling the cabin with expensive-smelling clutch smoke. Enough of that. Simply cramming our foot into the right pedal returned a time of 4.2 seconds to 60 mph, which we reckon is quick enough. It's not until well above 100 mph that the increased power of the new engine, with its bigger bore and longer stroke, comes into play. The 575M gets to 150 mph in 22.1 seconds - or 1.4 seconds quicker than the 550.